What do Bezalel Smotrich and a teenager with gender dysphoria have in common? Both are captives of an extremist, unrealistic and dangerous ideology.

The difference is that, while the Anti-Defamation League refused to meet Smotrich when he visited the US this week, the ADL campaigns for transgenderism, which the Pope now recognises as “one of the most dangerous ideological colonisations” because it “blurs differences and the value of men and women”.

Again, the fanatical Israeli finance minister and a troubled TikTok teen have more in common that we might suspect. If dangerous ideological colonisations are your thing, then Smotrich, who self-identifies as a political arsonist and religious dictator, is the hetero cis man for the job.

Bezalel Smotrich GettyImages-1247764230

Bezalel Smotrich (Getty Images)

But as the rabbis say, and the designers of public lavatories used to say, l’havdil: we must separate our categories.

The ADL is one of more than 70 Jewish American organisations that pledged not to meet Smotrich while he was in the US raising funds for Israel Bonds.

The boycotters issued an open letter, organised by the Progressive Israel Network after Smotrich said that the Palestinian village of Huwara should be “wiped out” following the murder of two Israelis by Huwara residents and the rioting that ensued.

A second letter, organised by the centre-left Israel Policy Forum, which works for the two-state solution, attracted the signatures of more than 120 prominent Jewish American leaders, including former US ambassadors and Abe Foxman, the ex-head of the ADL.

The biggest communal organisations (Aipac, the American Jewish Committee, the Conference of Presidents, the ADL) don’t intend to meet him either.

Smotrich’s subsequent public “soul searching” about what he now calls a “mistake” is not enough. The Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements refuse to recognise him.

This is rough justice, as he doesn’t want to recognise them. The soul that Smotrich is belatedly searching will survive without their ministrations, but the unity of klal Yisrael will not survive much more of this.

Smotrich is an arsonist and a disgrace. The American Jewish organisations’ reaction only pours fuel on the fire.

Their stated mission is to sustain the unity of the Jewish people, combat antisemitism and media propaganda against Israel, and ensure that Congressional support for Israel is bipartisan. Instead, they, like him and the thuggish Itamar Ben-Gvir, are playing domestic politics, even though this worsens a dangerous situation and hastens the splitting of the Jewish people.

Israeli cabinets come and go like kebab vans. Smotrich and the equally odious Ben-Gvir will soon be out of office. The major Jewish organisations could have followed the American tradition of “salute the uniform, not the man”. They could have refrained from grandstanding, though this might have dented their donations.

They could have made measured criticisms, and made a point of saying them in front of both Smotrich and the cameras. They could, like the Orthodox Union and the Zionist Organization of America, have said they would meet Smotrich, out of what the OU called a “responsibility to build mutual familiarity and understanding”, to strengthen the relationship between the State of Israel and American Jews.

Instead, the major organisations have publicly aligned against Israel’s democratically elected government.

As Freedom House admitted in this week’s annual report on the state of democracy across the world, the sky has not yet fallen on Israeli democracy, despite the current climate.

So far, Smotrich has issued only divisive and illiberal words. The Jewish organisations, however, have upped the ante, by responding to words with actions.

These actions are gestural. They are issued from the relative security of the US, where Jewish life is occasionally uncomfortable, rather than Israel, where it is under continual existential threat.

The American Jewish rhetoric carries less weight than Smotrich’s rhetoric, just as the Biden administration’s denunciations carry less weight when it’s obvious that American influence in the Middle East is in sharp decline.

The ADL and co, like the Biden administration, think they are asserting their values and their strength. In fact, they are demonstrating their growing irrelevance.

The foreign policy debate in America has become subsumed into the domestic culture war. Israel already was, because America’s foreign policy to Israel is, more than, say, its policy towards France, a domestic matter and hence inextricably a front in the culture war.

The ADL in particular has mutated into a press office for the Democratic Party and adopted positions far beyond the Jewish or American mainstream.

The ADL supports the medical “transitioning” of confused and unhappy school-age children who are too young to vote, drive, buy a beer or get a tattoo.

It supports gender self-ID, which allows males into female spaces such as girls’ lavatories in school. It supports what it calls “trans-inclusive athletic regulations” — also known as letting the biological boys stomp the biological girls.

Are we living in a golden age, when anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli incitement is a thing of the past? Or has a major communal institution lost the plot?
Political stupidity aside, there is a near-total ideological separation between Smotrich and the ADL.

Neither sees the other as legitimately Jewish. This gulf is real, and it’s rapidly widening. As I mentioned last week, Eric Kaufmann’s Tablet article “Trading Places” is required reading if you want to understand what’s happening to Jewish American society.

American Jewry is simultaneously assimilating to the point of disappearance and de-assimilating from the mainstream.

Non-Orthodox assimilation and Orthodox fecundity are tipping the demographic balance, and both processes seem irreversible. By as early as 2050, the majority of Jewish Americans will be Orthodox. They will be less bothered about whether Israel is the right kind of liberal democracy, and much more concerned with preserving its “Jewish character”.

Orthodox Americans have already written off the majority of Jewish Americans as lost souls whose liberalism is undermining the Jewish future. This is why the lines of the split over Smotrich are identical to those over transgenderism.

The non-Orthodox organisations somehow claim to be authentic bearers of Jewish tradition, while endorsing the idea that a biological man can become a woman, and, in cases like the ADL, adopting a domestic platform indistinguishable from that of the Democratic Party.

The Orthodox see transgenderism for the anti-human ideology it is. They are natural Republican voters, too.

The divergence of American and Israeli attitudes, whether over the value of democracy or the value of life itself, will intensify as Jewish American society continues to cross its demographic threshold.

Smotrich may look like a ghost from a past that liberal, largely irreligious Jewish Americans would prefer to forget, but the fiasco of his American visit is a taste of the future.

The fate of Jewish America may already be cast. The fate of the Jewish people depends on what happens next.